Lower the Sky and Come Down

Two brothers. One illness. When Bruno returns early from seminary, his younger brother watches him slip into the grip of schizophrenia—a grip that will not loosen for the rest of his life. Lower the Sky and Come Down traces more than fifty years of struggle: the intimate history of one family and the sweep of the postwar era through the early 2000s. Decades of attempts, of climbs and occasional falls; of asylums that functioned as concentration camps, then convulsed by Basaglia's reforms, then sliding back toward horrors the system thought it had left behind; of loneliness punctured by rare moments of light; of possible paths glimpsed but not always pursued. This is a fierce, poetic, pitiless novel—one that understands something crucial: personal history and grand history do not always intersect when we speak of disability. People with severe mental illness have always remained at the margins of political and social debate. There is still so much to be done for Bruno and for us. Let's do it together.